About Me

Staten Island, New York, United States
I've worked in the FDNY for the past 29 years. I've written freelance commentary for the past twenty years and have one book published "Looking Up (A Working View)," Quiet Storm Publishers. For those of you with whom my ideas resonate, we probably share a common love of Liberty. If you like anything you read here, feel free to reuse...just please add my appellation. Life's been more than fair to me and this is a part of my humble offering back. If you have any corrections, or additions, please email me (my email address is in my profile) and I’ll both appreciate and consider them all and do my best to get back to you with my thoughts on it. My ideas are always evolving and I’m open to persuasion in all areas. I thank all those who've taken some of their time to read here.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

On
Saturday morning (at the Midnight Premier of The Dark Knight Rises)
James Holmes entered an Aurora, Colorado movie theater through an emergency exit and began what’s
turned out to be the largest mass-shooting in American history – killing 12 and
wounding 58 others.

Holmes
had previously booby-trapped his apartment with small softball sized globes of
gasoline (there was over 10 gallons of gasoline inside that apartment) hooked
up to a circuit board and set to go off when various trip wires were touched.

The
carnage in Aurora, Colorado was designed to be and certainly could’ve been much, MUCH worse.

Immediately
the simplistic and naïve started calling for stricter gun control laws.

Ironically
enough, Holmes method of attack proved that guns were entirely ancillary to his
plan. When he entered the theater he unleashed a couple of canisters of noxious
gas and then tossed a few homemade grenades into the theater.

His
primary weapon of choice was explosives, followed up with small arms support.

There’s
absolutely NOTHING that even an all out gun ban would’ve done to stop this atrocity!
People (many people) can make guns in their own homes, in fact rudimentary
single-shot "zip guns" are extremely easy to make at home and kits are readily
available for making much more sophisticated weaponry.

And
what’s more, such information MUST be able to be freely exchanged, it’s a basic
1st Amendment issue – the free flow of ideas and information. The 1st
Amendment DOES NOT take into account that “SOME people may misuse or abuse such
information,”it CAN’T! People abuse virtually EVERY freedom there is, but that’s never
been an acceptable excuse for limiting them.

Perhaps
another mass murder can make this point even clearer by comparison. Back in March of
1990, Julio Gonzalez became engaged when the coat-check girl at a Bronx social
club spurned his advances. The deranged Gonzalez went to the nearest gas
station and filled a small jar with unleaded regular gas (cost UNDER $1) and
used a handkerchief as a makeshift wick.

Julio
Gonzalez then went back to the Happyland Social Club and sent the lit makeshift
Molotoff cocktail into that club – killing 87 people inside.

It
still stands as the largest mass murder in the U.S. by a single
perpetrator. No guns were used and incredibly enough, the total cost was LESS than $1.

There
are no laws, no bans that can stop the likes of James Holmes or Julio Gonzalez.
We, as yet, have no way to interdict such people BEFORE they commit their
actual crimes. Banning guns is akin to attempting to ban SUVs because drunk
drivers tend to do more damage while driving them – such inanely naïve schemes
focus on symptoms NOT the disease, they look to blame inanimate objects, NOT
the deranged people involved.

If
banning guns were the answer to the Aurora, Colorado Movie Theater massacre,
then banning gasoline would've been the appropriate response to the Happyland massacre and banning illegal immigrants (BOTH Julio Gonzalez AND Colin
Ferguson – the LIRR shooter were illegal immigrants) would’ve been the most
appropriate solutions to BOTH the Happyland and the LIRR massacres.

Sadly
such naïve approaches (blaming THINGS for the actions of PEOPLE) does nothing to
prevent similar acts in the future, nor even make them less likely.

The ONLY way to deal
with reducing such actions would be to look for ways to interdict such deranged
people before they act, which in a free society, becomes a rather dicey
proposition.

We don't seem ready to "go there," so naive, simplistic people continue to call for bans on THINGS instead of looking for ways to interdict the people intent on such carnage.